Berlin! Berlin! Dispatches from the Weimar Republic Color Picture Bookstore edition

Berlin! Berlin! is a satirical selection from the "man with the acid pen and the perfect pitch for hypocrisy," as New York author and Tucholsky-expert Peter Wortsman writes. This book os a complete collection of Tucholsky's news stories, features, satirical pieces, and poems about his hometown Berlin. It depicts Weimar Berlin, its cabarets, its policies, its follies, its ticks, and its celebrities, such as Pola Negri, Gussy Holl, Bert Brecht, Max Reinhardt, or Heinrich Zille. The book contains some of Tucholsky's most famous pieces, among them Berlin! Berlin!, a feature of the stereotypical Berliner on the phone, on vacation or doing "bizness", more than one satirical biography of the author himself, and some of his most famed stories such as where the holes in the cheese come from, or about the lion who escaped the Berlin zoo. Herr Wendriner, the chatty Berlin businessman makes an appearance, as well as Lottchen, the flapper, modelled after one of Tucholsky's real-life gilrfriends. Also Tucholsky's long-term friends Karlchen and Jakopp are part of this book. The foreword was written by Anne Nelson, the author of "The Red Orchestra: The Story of the Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler". Ian King, the distinguished chair of the Kurt-Tucholsky-Society and a former professor of German in London and Sheffield, who wrote his Ph. D. on Tucholsky and is the co-editor of Volume 3 of Tucholsky's Complete Works provided a biographical introduction. "His writings still have lessons for us today," King writes, "that a man who might have preferred to write idylls, humorous pieces and unpolitical verse instead devoted his life to fighting against injustice and arguing passionately against the addiction to military uniforms which afflicted too many of his compatriots." Peter Schneider, the author of the Berlin novel "Walljumper" writes about this book: "Kurt Tucholsky was one of the most brilliant German-Jewish writers and satirists of his time. He had to leave his beloved Berlin because of his biting, witty stories against militarism and Nazi Fascism. Today's Berliners adore him as one of the greatest sons of this city. The world has yet to discover his genius." This collection of Tucholsky's stories has never been published in America-or in English language-before. This book will hopefully help to rediscover the famed writer in the United States.